Intel’s next Thunderbolt version doubles speeds, can multitask

Thunderbolt adoption still hasn't reached critical mass, but Intel will continue to iterate on the technology.

Chris Foresman

We're not far off from the introduction of Intel's next-generation Haswell processors, but this isn't the only new technology that Intel has in the hopper. In a presentation at this year's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show, the company also took some time to detail upcoming enhancements to its high-speed Thunderbolt interface.

Engadget reports that the next-generation version of the interface, called "Falcon Ridge," is due out in 2014, and it will double the speed of current Thunderbolt controllers—we'd heard rumors about this controller before, but this is our first official confirmation from Intel. The second-generation "Cactus Ridge" controllers were capable of 10Gbps transfer speeds, but Falcon Ridge increases this to 20Gbps. Falcon Ridge also apparently has enough bandwidth to display a 4K image and transfer files at the same time, and it will be backward-compatible with existing cables and devices.

In the meantime, this year's Haswell processors will be paired with another slightly less exciting Thunderbolt update, codenamed "Redwood Ridge." This controller keeps the same 10Gbps speed as Cactus Ridge but consumes a bit less power, supports DisplayPort 1.2, and will reportedly be integrated into some of Haswell's chipsets, obviating the need for a separate controller chip. Intel won't say specifically which Haswell chipsets will and won't feature the integrated controller, but it may be a feature confined to higher-end chipsets, at least initially.

Thunderbolt in its current iteration is already faster than the 5Gbps of USB 3.0, but it has a number of problems that have slowed its adoption: it requires a separate controller chip, its cables are expensive (paying $30 or $40 for a new one is not uncommon), and the standard just hasn't been adopted widely enough to attain critical mass. Beyond Apple's Mac lineup, a handful of PC motherboards and laptops, and some high-end storage accessories, it's still pretty difficult to find, something that may be due to licensing issues as much as cost.

Integration into Intel's chipsets could help spur adoption—without a separate chip, Thunderbolt would both cost less and take less space to integrate. However, unless more peripheral makers get on board, Thunderbolt still just won't be able to do all that much.

80 Reader Comments

I'm really surprised that they're going to be able to push double the bandwidth over the same cables. Given how much processing is on the cable itself (hence the high price), I would have thought that the cables wouldn't support the newer standard.

Or is this a case of "you can use your old cables, but you'll be limited to the old connection speeds"?

Are they joking? My 2011 MBP has only two USB ports and a-completely-useless Thunderbolt port sitting idly next them. I would love to put that thing to use with a dock to enable USB 3.0 and HDMI when it's on my desk; but sadly, nobody has seen fit to sell any reasonable accessories.

Keep doubling the speed for peripherals mainstream consumers can't use, Intel. That sounds like a recipe for continued success.

I use thunderbolt to link to a SSD at my desk and it is phenomenal for that. Like others, I just wish there was a dock that I could plug my mouse, monitor, SSD, etc. into and then only have a thunderbolt cable to plug into my laptop.

I don't know why it has taken accessory manufacturers so long to even release something capable of these very basic tasks. I understand that the price point would have to be higher because of the processors to handle that data rates but a lot of people are willing to pay that price for the daily simplicity of not having to yank 6 cords out of their laptop 3-4 times per day.

Thunderbolt in its current iteration is already faster than the 5Gbps of USB 3.0

But double-speed USB 3.0 (10 Gbps) is supposed to come next year as well, and doesn't require expensive cables (which are really an inevitable consequence of the Thunderbolt design). I don't have any desire for Thunderbolt to catch on.

I use thunderbolt to link to a SSD at my desk and it is phenomenal for that. Like others, I just wish there was a dock that I could plug my mouse, monitor, SSD, etc. into and then only have a thunderbolt cable to plug into my laptop.

I don't know why it has taken accessory manufacturers so long to even release something capable of these very basic tasks. I understand that the price point would have to be higher because of the processors to handle that data rates but a lot of people are willing to pay that price for the daily simplicity of not having to yank 6 cords out of their laptop 3-4 times per day.

Great points and I agree. This type of problem is why we buy Lenovo T and X series machines with the port replicator / docks that you just drop the machine onto to connect. This is much more convenient than connecting all of those cables. For notebooks that don't offer "real" port replicator / docks, it would be great to have a single thunderbolt cable like you are asking for.

5 Gbps is then 625 mB/s right? Now how many consumer are going to hit that with their external storage devices? Paying more for Thunderbolt doesn't make sense if you can't make use of the bandwidth.

Thunderbolt isn't really intended to replace USB. It is meant to be an additional interface to handle the things that USB can't support. Though most devices don't need this much bandwidth, some do. If you are using a laptop, Thunderbolt is fantastic for connecting to high-speed storage arrays, multiple displays, etc. If I am buying a laptop I want it to have both USB3 and Thunderbolt and those laptops are available. If someone wants to buy a cheaper laptop without Thunderbolt because they never need that much bandwidth, then that option is available on the market too.

Like others, I just wish there was a dock that I could plug my mouse, monitor, SSD, etc. into and then only have a thunderbolt cable to plug into my laptop.

The closest thing to that is the Apple Thunderbolt display. Yeah, I know, it's expensive, but all Thunderbolt peripherals are expensive. I have a few users set up this way: their display is plugged in to the wired gigabit Ethernet, it has their kb/mouse, printers and scanners and other USB devices plugged in and they just plug the TB cable and the power cable to their laptops.

Korgoth wrote:

5 Gbps is then 625 MB/s right? Now how many consumer are going to hit that with their external storage devices? Paying more for Thunderbolt doesn't make sense if you can't make use of the bandwidth.

What's the small-print on this? If you use a current $50 Tb cable between two Falcon Ridge devices, will it force the connection to fallback to 10Gbps? If you daisy-chain a few devices together will they all have to be FR to get the full 20Gbps?

I love thunderbolt. I never thought I could dump my MacPro, but Thunderbolt made it possible. Have 3 disk arrays paired to my thunderbolt display. When I do disk intensive stuff I just dock my rMPB and can play with 20 terra. Totally stabile and over 500 meg/sec.

Sure. USB3 is great. But USB 2 was not stable/fast enough to be a work disk.

Todays thunderbold have 2 10Gbps channels bi directional. So will this mean that a single cable will have 40Gbps bandwidth in the next version?

And when will Intel integrate Thunderbolt into their Xeon line? Its idiotic that there is no MacPro with thunderbolt since no Xeon processor have integrated graphics --> no Displayport out on Thunderbolt.

But double-speed USB 3.0 (10 Gbps) is supposed to come next year as well

That still only makes it half as fast as current TB, which sits at 20Gbit/s bidirectional, and a quarter of this new 2014 version. Also, USB is not comparable to TB, it's still a "dumb" polled interface, compared to the encapsulated PCI Express of TB, which is capable of interrupts, independent device-initiated transfers and all of that. Plus, video as well of course.

USB simply can't do what TB can, so it's not a drop-in replacement.

Quote:

and doesn't require expensive cables (which are really an inevitable consequence of the Thunderbolt design).

The cables are needlessly overpriced, due to lack of adoption and competition. They don't cost anywhere the sales price to manufacture, of course. Active cables in general are required at the signal speeds TB works at, certainly for this new 2014 iteration; it's pretty much a fundamental limitation of the universe. Without it, impedance and noise would garble the signal too much to be reliably readable. To not require active cabling would have necessitated slower signalling speed, meaning more wires to transfer the same amount of data. This leads to thicker, less flexible cabling. Seeing as USB3 is already plenty thick as it is, I doubt anyone would want to go further in that direction...

Are they joking? My 2011 MBP has only two USB ports and a-completely-useless Thunderbolt port sitting idly next them. I would love to put that thing to use with a dock to enable USB 3.0 and HDMI when it's on my desk; but sadly, nobody has seen fit to sell any reasonable accessories.

I'm pretty sure usb can't handle graphics cards (thunderbolt theoretically can. However, only sony released one and it is only compatible with their laptops).

USB can handle graphics (look at usb displayport adaptors). Of course not at the resolutions of thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt can be almost pure PCIE, so it is very efficient with very little overhead. Whereas the usb protocol is still quite heavy and slow (even things like USBASP really cannot compare to thunderbolt).

Why wouldn't USB be able to handle anything the slower and non-standard Thunderbolt can?

Thunderbolt is faster than USB3. It is also a standard with support by multiple vendors, just not a widely adopted one yet (and just to note both Thunderbolt and USB3 require licensing fees so don't say that Thunderbolt isn't a standard just because you have to license it).

Thunderbolt has many advantages over USB such as support for displays, more certainty around latency for low-latence systems, significantly higher bandwidth, reduced port requirements on laptops, etc. It also has some disadvantages such as higher cost cabling, lack of embedded support in chipsets (though this is changing), lower adoption rate, etc. However, there are many, many use cases that require the features offered by Thunderbolt that USB3 does not provide.

It's nice tech. Honestly. It's just not well-supported and there isn't a ton out there that utilizes it. Start making smartphones that connect using it for charging and data?..... $$$. Start making physically small storage that's relatively inexpensive?.... $$$. I really hate to say this, but USB's widespread acceptance and utility beyond data transfer is damn hard to beat. Thunderbolt is a nice niche product, but like any niche product, you need to really play to your customers.

Edit: strongbad above brings up some really nice points about it. All of those great things about Thunderbolt are true. The downsides though are just too big of a hurdle presently. Again, niche product. It's not bad..... just has more appeal to a smaller consumer base at the moment.

I do Thunderbolt electrical compliance testing as well as USB 3.0, SATA/SAS and PCI Express 3.0 electrical testing. My 2 cents, good luck getting 20Gbps over a single copper wire. They're either going to need to change their encoding scheme along with some new techniques for equalization or require optical cables going from the computers and devices. Either way, getting 20Gbps per lane will not be that useful unless its external storage such as NAS systems. I personally like the idea of external graphics cards, but that's going to be hard to implement with windows drivers it remains a current problem.

But look at SATA/SAS as an example. SATA is maxing out at 6Gbps with no intention of increasing its speed, while SAS is attacking 12Gbps for commercial usage. Companies are focusing on not bringing the really fast speeds to consumers and internally things are looking a mess in terms of compiling multiple standards into each other. I'm personally hoping they will make things better...someday

And when will Intel integrate Thunderbolt into their Xeon line? Its idiotic that there is no MacPro with thunderbolt since no Xeon processor have integrated graphics --> no Displayport out on Thunderbolt.

I think that you are seeing one of the major drawbacks of Thunderbolt's slightly awkward niche as a way for Macbook Pros to finally support docking stations without having an ugly, high-pin-count connector on the bottom:

Since it lumps together external PCIe and Displayport, it is rather awkward to implement except with CPU-integrated graphics or laptop/SFF systems with a discrete GPU that is tightly coupled to the rest of the system. Since it has a video component, you can't just slap a thunderbolt port into a PCIe slot(whether as an add on card or on the motherboard); but since it has a PCIe component, your discrete graphics card, which is already one hop away from the root of the PCIe bus and only has 16 lanes for its own needs and those of any downstream devices, isn't a terribly good place for a thunderbolt port(much less several).

That, along with the relatively high price and hassle of the Intel-only silicon, makes it rather less compelling for a workstation, where you can just pop in an SAS or Fibre channel card and connect to disk shelves that you can already buy(and at what look like commodity prices by 'enterprise' standards, no less!). Yes, it's neat that Thunderbolt could theoretically support essentially any peripheral that PCIe could; but if you already have internal card slots for that, it isn't terribly exciting.

As an expensive-but-elegant take on the docking station, it's a pretty good solution; but it's an awkward fit for anything that isn't severely expansion limited, at least until it gets a great deal cheaper, or the range of peripherals becomes compelling enough that people actively want to plug them into desktops and workstations.

When will they have a wireless bubble so we can get rid of all the usb, vga, and everything else but power cords.. Damn can't even make decent wireless mouse still

They won't. They will just be coming with more standards that have less cords that include all the previous standards, like Thunderbolt. USB Wireless failed. Otherwise having all-in-one device like all-in-one computers or tablets is the way of the future.

Are they joking? My 2011 MBP has only two USB ports and a-completely-useless Thunderbolt port sitting idly next them. I would love to put that thing to use with a dock to enable USB 3.0 and HDMI when it's on my desk; but sadly, nobody has seen fit to sell any reasonable accessories.

I really like Thunderbolt. I hope that doesn't mean it's doomed It's what I call finally a real 21st century technology, along with retina screens, multicore CPUs and SSDs.

Come on Intel, release a dirt cheap TB to USB circuit board for $5 & watch the world + dog fall over themselves to buy 4 port full speed usb hubs to plug into TB sockets. You could sell cheap ones without video ports and various more expensive ones with Ethernet and video ports and downstream TB ports. Just sell them for a couple of years to kick start the market.

I love thunderbolt but having Intel only partially support it is killing the technology.

It may be the least supported technology Intel has since Itanium (just swap apple for HP and you've got the same story)

Actually, I gathered from the story that Intel is integrating thunderbolt into their chipsets. Don't forget the new, smaller form factors that Intel is pushing (which will likely need external expansion since there will not be enough room inside). Also, Intel is getting heavily involved in video by integrating it into the CPU and thunderbolt just happens to double as a video connector. While I do agree that Intel hasn't really pushed the technology and was content to let Apple do that for them (I guess they're hoping for a repeat of USB 1.0), I really do think that this will change in a big way.

Are they joking? My 2011 MBP has only two USB ports and a-completely-useless Thunderbolt port sitting idly next them. I would love to put that thing to use with a dock to enable USB 3.0 and HDMI when it's on my desk; but sadly, nobody has seen fit to sell any reasonable accessories.

"Belkin representatives promised the Express Dock would—for really real this time—ship in the first quarter of 2013. The launch price, which had gone up to $400 over the course of development, is now back down to $300."

The first quarter of 2013 has already passed: and they're still taking pre-orders. For a device that was announced almost three years ago. Go ahead and give them your money, smart ass.

Intel has the wrong priorities. The problem with Thunderbolt isn't speed, it's cost. I would far rather get 10Gb Thunderbolt for half the price (and half price cables) next year rather than twice as fast Thunderbolt at the same price. Thunderbolt will die in a niche if they don't bring the prices of the chips and cables dramatically down, and this move works against that. Good move, Intel. /s

The comments here make it sound like another Firewire (IEEE 1394), useful for the few peripherals that took advantage of it, camcorder and a film scanner for me, but nothing I had to have in my next PC.

It's a technology I'd love to be able to make use of. In theory a single cable allows you to completely separate the computer from I/O, and potentially to have multiple locations for I/O for the machine.

For someone who uses a mixture of 15m cabling and wireless devices to be able to use his computer in 2 locations the potential future applications of Thunderbolt are pretty exciting.

It's a very forward thinking technology that has the potential to revolutionise the way we handle home computing.

Discreet graphics does seem to be an issue currently and hopefully we'll see graphics cards manufacturers getting involved... It'd be great to be able to wire a house for Thunderbolt and then leave the main household processing and storage in a closet. Though for this to happen we also need software to advance... So the same machine can handle multiple user sessions in multiple locations running all applications including games simultaneously.

I use thunderbolt to link to a SSD at my desk and it is phenomenal for that. Like others, I just wish there was a dock that I could plug my mouse, monitor, SSD, etc. into and then only have a thunderbolt cable to plug into my laptop.

I don't know why it has taken accessory manufacturers so long to even release something capable of these very basic tasks. I understand that the price point would have to be higher because of the processors to handle that data rates but a lot of people are willing to pay that price for the daily simplicity of not having to yank 6 cords out of their laptop 3-4 times per day.

Are they joking? My 2011 MBP has only two USB ports and a-completely-useless Thunderbolt port sitting idly next them. I would love to put that thing to use with a dock to enable USB 3.0 and HDMI when it's on my desk; but sadly, nobody has seen fit to sell any reasonable accessories.

"Belkin representatives promised the Express Dock would—for really real this time—ship in the first quarter of 2013. The launch price, which had gone up to $400 over the course of development, is now back down to $300."

The first quarter of 2013 has already passed: and they're still taking pre-orders. For a device that was announced almost three years ago. Go ahead and give them your money, smart ass.

They also claimed at Macworld 2013 (Feb 2) that it would be out by the end of February. How they can go from being one month till on the shelves, to being vaporware, I'm not sure.

And the Henge dock is just a passthrough device. It just lines up your cables in a piece of plastic and doesn't do anything particularly interesting with them.

I like the concept of thunderbolt: a fast, standardized way to combine multiple connectivity ports. The actual implementation has been a big meh at best. I read the first few reviews (have anything changed since?) and it had tons of random issues that made it not plug and play perfect.

The other issue is what I would use it for. My external hard drive is limited by the mechanical disk, not by the connections anymore now that I have USB 3.0. And my DVI/HDMI works perfect for my 3 monitors. I have a hard time even finding any decently priced displayport capable monitors. I don't do graphics work so the mid-line monitors are plenty for what I need.

The ONLY thing that would make me buy a thunderbolt device is an external graphics card implementation. Honestly, that's the only thing that can make use of the ultra high speeds thunderbolt can do. Yeah you can have raided SSD's as an external hard drive but seriously, that's even more of a niche than high performance gaming.

Much as I like my new desktop, it is big and heavy and having a small laptop is appealing. Make one (almost got the Sony one but it had too many tradeoffs) with a thunderbolt discrete graphics card that I can swap in and out and you got my money.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.